1 Contested and Significant Epoch Designation Modernism and Early

contested and significant epoch designation modernism and early twentieth-century British music do not sit comfortably together. All too often, a piece of music is perceived as either modernist (as is the vant-garde or other continental European or American trends in composition) or as British (as are Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Holst, Walton, or even Britten). At best, the narrative of a time lag between continental modernism and a British modernism centred around Britten or the avant-garde of the New Music Manchester Group (here meaning composers Alexander Goehr, Harrison Birtwistle, and Peter Maxwell Davies from the mid-1950s onwards) was able to quell this problem a problem that remains aggravated by the Dickensian notion of Britain as the land without music .1 More recent attempts to bridge the gap between early twentieth-century modernism and British music have tried various solutions, but one of the most obvious has not been applied rigorously: a look among British women composers of the early twentieth century. This is not to say, fortunately, that there are no studies about Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Grace Williams, Elisabeth Lutyens, Elizabeth Maconchy, or Imogen Holst (in order of date of birth). Yet behind this statement lurks a further powerful confrontation next to the one between 1 Oscar A. H. Schmitz, Das Land ohne Musik. Englische Gesellschaftsprobleme (3rd ed., Munich: G. Müller, 1914). Schmitz maintains that the lack of music in English society is a signifier of its lack of great individuals and individuality in general, which is created by an assumed mediocrity deeply rooted in the entire society (pp. 28 9). The study of British music has engaged with this verdict in various ways and the catchy title still enjoys frequent usage as a rhetorical device (cf. Andrew Blake, The Land without Music: Music, Culture, and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain Victorian Literature and Culture 32.1 [2004], 261 Myth and a Legend. The The Musical Times no. 1904 [2008], 53 60; et al.). 1 modernism and British music; that of modernism and gender. Again, an outdated tradition, this time of separating modern composers and modern women composers in British music (fo European Music in the Twentieth Century), rears its head, implying that women composers generally pursue different agendas in their compositions than modernist (men) composers,2 or that they are simply incapable of composing well in any style. th birthday celebrations in The Listener of 1966, critic Stephen Walsh launched an attack in this vein: leading composers of her generation. To my ears there has always been an element of dryness -feminist to suggest that it may have something to do with her sex. Female creative artists have always been rare even in literature, the most immediate of the arts while in music, at least, the gap between men and women in performance is small, if indeed it exists. Here again it is most measurable at the very top, where interpretation fades into visionary genius a quality which is demonstrably anti- feminine. [...] And with Lutyens, even in maturity, it remains true that her music often makes structural points which are hamstrung by the ordinariness of her creative thought. 3 Although this opinion sounds ludicrous to modern ears, Sally MacArthur has called it, has still not been resolved, despite several waves of feminism and their different strategies to tackle it.4 This paper suggests that the main reason that women 2 European Music in the Twentieth Century (London: Penguin, 1957, 1961), 132 Hugh Wood, which discusses works by a number of British composers among them Elisabeth Lutyens as the only female composer on equal footing.) 3 The Listener, 8 December 1966, 869. 4 -first century MLA Notes 64.2 [2007], pp. 209 15) has refused to go away Musicology Australia 36.1 [2014], pp. 36 52). 2 composers have not been considered as salutary British modernists is that early twentieth- century modernism .5 In order to validate this claim and at the same time cut out a working definition of modernism, we can look to (and in extension, its canons) as well as its aesthetics and criticism. peer groups in the arts, literature, and music are populated with alpha males such as Wyndham Lewis for the Vorticists, Kirchner for Die Brücke, Marinetti for the Futurists, or Schoenberg and Webern for the Second Viennese School. Even a popular survey of musical modernism and the early twentieth century, The Rest Is Noise, cannot break free from this impression: The only woman composers preceding late-twentieth century modernists are Mahler (albeit merely in and an unreliable biographer), Tailleferre, and Crawford Seeger.6 Needless to say, important sidekicks of at least Mahler- were affiliated with early twentieth-century modernist groups. F librettist of Erwartung, Marie Pappenheim, or his pupils Natalie Prawossudowitsch and Dika Newlin, to name but a few, bore the flame for women modernists in some of high modernism environments. Yet the canons of modernism (here meaning a mostly high-brow response to the perceived dissolving of tonality in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century) are still more often than not assembled from men, from continental- European and American , and from masculine attributes ascribed to the included pieces. the fourth instalment of The Oxford History of Western Music is symptomatic of the lack of women composers as well as of British composers generally. Instead of opening the canons, it ascribes maximalism both to 5 T musical modernism are not inherently misogynist, but [...] modernism indeed provides a space for forms of expression by Ellie M. Hisama, Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford Seeger, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], 11). I in fact agree with Hisama that there is nothing wrong with modernism itself, but more space for women composers is needed in the canons of British musical modernism. 6 Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise (New York: Picador, 2007). 3 the composer of the gigantic Gurrelieder, Schoenberg, as well as to the composer of miniature orchestral pieces, Webern, as if the seal of quality was to be won in a competition for the most extreme quantity of bars and parts (a reading which does an injustice even to Schoenberg and Webern themselves). Meanwhile, a more parochial ongoing discourse about musical modernism in Britain is in danger of overlooking some of its most promising (women) modernists. Of these, the composer with the most undeniable affiliation to modernism (in the traditional sense as emancipating dissonance) is Elisabeth Lutyens one of the earliest dodecaphonists in the country and incidentally trailblazing collection British Music and Modernism. 1895 1960.7 the gap between modernism and British music. This article examines different layers on (the dominant continental composition technique of her time and her composition process of choice in her concert music) and how her engagement with it was read both in her critical and analytic reception. Against the resulting entanglement of gender and composition technique, this examination sets the notion , which is supported by choices in her texts and her settings, in particular her cantata for soprano, mandolin, harp, guitar, and strings, O saisons, ô châteaux! of 1946. This work serves as the central case study for the exploration of the path Lutyens took in order to transcend a superimposed masculinity of modernism. Although this Cantata is a relatively early piece in her official oeuvre, it can stand as representative of some of her best compositions, having frequently been singled out as one of her finest works and 7 British Music and Modernism. 1895 1960, ed. Matthew Riley (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 269 291. 4 having been devoted more space to the process of its conception and composition in her autobiography than many other works. 8 The aversion to the woman composer expressed in is couched in an ideology which portrays female composers and , independently of which idiom they choose to express their ideas in. Men composers, by contrast, are credited with the ability of being a makes a good performer or a muse owing to her ordinariness and, presumably, her sensitivity, but the nary, and above all male, creative thought (coincidentally, a book like popular twentieth-century music survey, albeit critical of this idea, repeats it: His twentieth-century women can be teachers, performers, librettists, and wives, but rarely composers in their own right). that of his more prominent romanticist predecessor Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who sought to separate genius and femininity forever by claiming that women gh hard work. But the celestial fire that emblazen sublime writings. These creations are as cold and pretty as women; they have an abundance of 9 8 New Music 88 (1988), 11. 9 Jean- the Lied, 1775 in Jane Bowers, Judith Tick (eds), Women Making Music (Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 225 (referenced in Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics , 36). 5 Walsh may have been in exalted company, but the expression of his world view still provoked a strong response by pianist Susan Bradshaw and composer Richard Rodney Bennett in the following issue of The Listener, where they O saisons ô châteaux! (among other pieces) .10 Walsh in turn responded in the same issue with the clarification that gist of my argument was that although women made excellent artist-technicians (at least as good as men), there was a certain quality of femininity which

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